This Is A Video Of Me Cutting My Finger Off

I should have known something was up when, as I began to dream, an FBI piracy warning faded into view. I wonder if that means I can’t tell you this story. Well it’s too late now, and I’m already getting ahead of myself.

This story starts on Youtube.

Specifically, it starts the time I looked down in my “Recommended Videos” section and saw a video entitled “This Is A Video Of Me Cutting My Finger Off”. It was posted by a guy who’s profile was a string of letters and numbers that seemed random at the time. Looking at his uploads, all the videos used a similar naming structure. There were titles in the list like “This Is A Video Of Us Not Getting Along”, “This Is A Video Of The Reverse Side”, and of course the video that was recommended to me. Curiosity got the best of me and I started the video up.

It was a video of a blond man that I could reasonably believe could have been any age between 23 and 43. He wore a red button-up shirt. He was sitting at a black table outdoors and disembodied arms in billowy black sleeves, possibly connected to out of frame characters, alternately placed empty cornflower blue plates in front of him and then took them away. He stared directly into the camera and spoke, but all the sound was removed except for the distinct hiss of pink noise. None of the individual elements of the video was particularly strange, or even interesting, but somehow I found the combination of elements disturbing.

I opted out of watching any of the other videos, and practically forgot all about it until I went to bed and that FBI warning popped up. It was exactly like the beginning of a film.

As the opening scene faded in, I was seated at the table with the blond man. Waiters were serving us what turned out to be all of my favorite foods, course after course of them in the perfect serving sizes. I could barely notice the food, however, because the blond man was talking to me and it took all the concentration I could muster to follow what he said.

“I know how to help you talk to that person you’ve been meaning to talk to,” he said, as if I knew exactly who he was talking about. It was probably no coincidence that I genuinely did. “I also can describe in great detail everything you need to change about yourself in the meantime before then…” he continued, but his voice began to stutter and drift. I had to concentrate really hard to make out what only occasionally sounded sort of like real words. It almost hurt, focusing so hard, like I was having to translate a barely familiar language. Eventually, I strained so hard I pulled myself back into the waking world. Attempts to fall back to sleep and return to the scene all failed.

I did this wrong somehow, I thought to myself with no idea why. I’ve got to start all over again.

I immediately went from my bed to the computer desk to watch the video again, but the account was pulled. No explanation was given.

It was like the whole thing never happened, yet I still vividly recall my failure.